Greetings, everyone. The universe registered its...amusement, perhaps, at my Great Thinky by dropping in my lap Dr. Laura Schlessinger's use of "nigger" repeatedly and insistence that any black person having problems with the use of the word is being hypersensitive and uppity - for which she apologized for using the particular word, but not for the context, her belief that people marrying outside their race should just have to deal with racist comments, and her further belief that electing Barack Obama meant that black people were completely satisfied with everything and should stop whining about race relations.
And The Slacktivist takes a swing at Tony Perkins, professional liar, in a quandary of whether being a liar or a deliberate liar is worse for said liar and his victims, which brings to mind the quote about Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics, all three of which things the professional liar is well-acquainted with. And thus, he probably knows the "traditional" marriage that all the professional liars want their victims to defend is really a product of about the 1970s - marriage through history has been far more colorful and has evolved greately from the beginnings. After all, it used to be about contracts, politics, and joining families and fortunes - love had very little to do with it. So, yeah.
Finally, to complete the amusement, the Slacktivist points out of many possible infrasturucture improvements that would help solve a lot of problems together - the federal government commits to buy offshore wind electricity, which should in turn spur the private sector to build those offshore wind energy plants, resulting in jobs for the unemployed and in reducing one’s dependence on fossil-fuel burns. It’s a solution even a die-hard private-sector over all conservative should be able to work with - private investment, private jobs, and government buying from the private sector at market rates. What’s not to like? It’s not a complete solution, but it also might help spur the thought that America is capable of Big Things and get us moving on doing other Big Things to solve Big Problems. It’s certainly better than emulating Chile in privatizing Social Security, as Sharron Angle claims we should be doing.
To cleanse the palate from that awful taste, a short segment of Annie Oakley firing weapons, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of her birth.
Speaking of birthdays, a very merry (belated) one to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
greyweirdo, without whom I probably would have never seen and enjoyed Seven Samurai.
And finally in our headlining section, warning labels for journalism stories, useful for when someone should know important information about the article, or “article”, they are reading. There should proabbly be a lot of those plastered all around my blog posts, shouldn’t there? Well, maybe if someone archive-dives, they’ll go to the trouble of it, and if they do, could they lay down some tags, please, too? *sweatdrop*
Out in the world today, expect the fear grade to ramp up significantly as the first shipment of nuclear fuel for Iran's Bushehr plant will be loaded in and the plant fired up. This also means that people can start making concrete data on whether or not Iran intends to use the stuff for nuclear weapons development. One way or another, I suspect we’re going to find out what exactly countries are going to do.
The groundwork for breaking the August 2011 deadline for troop drawdown in Afghanistan begins from General Petraeus, building in the loophole of “as conditions on the ground permit” so as to prevent anyone from actually having to make good on a promise. Elsewhere, private security contractors, i.e. mercenaries, are on notice to get out of Afghanistan in four months, when they will be banned.
Wikileaks intend to publish the rest of the Pentagon documents it has received, after combing through them to remove things like names that would hurt people if published in the clear. According to the Pentagon, those released documents would cause even more damage that the ones already put out have. We repeat the point made before - if you don’t want to be burnt by the publication of your documents, you might want to stop or reduce the amount of things you do that would set up that situation.
Domestically, we peer in on Detroit, a place that suffers greatly from bad infrastructure, lack of business, and a host of other problems, while it revitalizes itself and works out problems on a very local level, including things like community gardens, resolution parks, and a DIY attitude to get neighbors to build their neighborhoods again, instead of being too afraid of each other to band together.
Mr. Taibbi is back, reminding us why we like long-form journalism and showing that the financial reform bill, much like all the big-ticket legislative accomplishments of the Obama administration, is only a fraction of what it could have been, thanks to the interference of the opposition party, the party in power, lobbyists, and businesses with a giant stake in making sure it didn't actually change all that much, including the underlying structure of the “check-bouncing scheme” that was the subprime mortgage-to-AAA-investments-leveraged-50-times-over scheme perpetrated by banks. The populist anger that was there and wanted actual bad things to happen to those who had run the economy into the iceberg was carefully ignored and maneuvered around by the politicians so that the White Star Line could tout its new line of government-approved and regulated impregnable ships that will go sailing into ice-infested waters at full speed.
The Marine Corps may be returning to its expeditionary forces origins, as part of a services review that is supposed to create some savings on Pentagon spending over the next five years.
And in places where real people are, an article looking into doing lots of possession reduction to find more happiness, so that one is not stuck in the work-consumption treadmill (one we’d love to get off of, if the blasted debts didn’t keep at us...), culminating in basically trying to pack one's life on a portable hard drive.
At 75 years of age, everybody wants to be the one to fix Social Security, usually by transforming it into a shadow of its former self, or allowing the private sector and its fluctuations to tie themselves into the trust fund's money. And, as those of us who follow politics have found out, Social Security privatization is one of the more...sane issues the politics is about this election cycle.
In technology, having been pioneers of wi-fi availability to draw in customers, some coffeehouses are now pulling the plug on their connectivity, catering to the audience that wants coffee instead of Internet, those audiences that feel wireless Internet is too much of a distraction, or trying to dislodge the permanent customer taking up residence for the entire day to use the Internet without purchasing much. We plug public libraries, most of which offer a free wireless Internet signal, but you’ll have to contend with library crowds and space - if you need pristine, no-distractions life, the public library may or may not be for you.
Jupiter might have killed a kid brother planet early on in the formation of the Sol system, grabbing a massive rocky planet, swallowing it whole, and burning up most of the rocky elements into its atmosphere, according to a hypothesis generated on why Jupiter’s core is smaller than most gas giants and why it has a much heaver concentration of heavy elements in its atmosphere.
If you've been suckered into choosing a bad option because it looks better than a worse option, then you're not alone - even single-celled molds will choose the median option when presented with extremes.
An estimation of how many books there are in the world, based on sifting through records and removing all the duplicates, not-books, and other things, including T-shirts and a turkey probe.
Welcome to opinions, where a crystal ball sees military and despotic governments coming to power when the climate change phenomenon finally disrupts people enough that they get mad and start fighting back opposed to forces insistent that oil exploration and drilling continue immediately, despite the current lack of effective safety mechanisms for that process.
There’s also very well-thought out reasons why someone would want to not have kids, none of which have anything to do with mental illness, pathology, or somehow subverting the “inevitable” desires of the biological clock.
And then there’s the people confident that the Democratic Party are sunk in this election because their "Blame Bush" strategy isn't working. I don’t know about that - I think the Democrats have moved on to “Look at what sort of insane people the Republican party has put up for candidates - do you really want those people running the roost?” and that Mr. Rove is trying to turn it back into a “Blame Bush” strategy. Ms. strassel follows that lead and highlights three Democrats who voted mostly against the major points in the president's agenda who are doing better than the despicable Democrats are supposed to be doing. They’re not necessarily winning, but they’re polling better because they’re in conservative districts and they voted conservative instead of liberal. Transplant them to, say, the progressive center of the country and they’re going out on their ears. Trying to say that going along with the Obama agenda is a sink or swim issue is simpleminded at best. Mr. Zuckerman is more worried that our current state is the new normal, which is extremely bad for us all.
Perhaps taking the cake for “Missed the point, there, by a wide margin” - Mr. Douthat says "Yes, it's wonderful that we have a constitution that espouses freedom of religion, but really, those Muslims have to adapt to American demands and assimilate if they ever want to have a hope of being something other than The Bloodthirsty Religion", including not building their house of worship so close to where someone committed a terrorist attack. The way things work is not, “Well, assimilate into us and then we’ll accept you.” but “Here, let us try to bridge our culture and yours, so that you will want to enhance us with your diversity, assimilate in nicely, and still feel like you can retain enough of your identity to feel comfortable.” The bridging process includes making sure that omeone has the right to worship without interference or discrimination from xenophobes. Although I suppose that if the opposition is claiming the proposed msoque really is part of the attack site because a fragment of the plane struck and damaged the building, and the opposition has to resort to sneering at the prominence of the people supporting the Constitution, instead of offering arguments as to why they think the First Amendment is wrong and should be set aside in favor of “cultural sensitivity” - wait a minute, I’ve heard this argument before, except usually they’re the ones thundering along about the inviolate Constitution. Once they can muster a real argument, I'll be happy to listen to them. Whether they’re a joker on the street or the Senate Majority Leader trying to seem closer to Sharron Angle, instead of running very firmly away from her positions.
Finally, in opinions, the accusation of the empty suit, except this time as a comic book character, along with the accusation that the President's a super-leftist socialist, a Muslim appeaser, an apology maker where he should be wagging his finger and telling other nations they can't get close to our awesome, and that we should expect him to jump the shark sometime soon, because his ratings are in the toilet and the script-writers will want something to get people watching again. It’s a greatest misses album full of cover songs.
Last for tonight, going straight to the source: Having members of the Japanese Yakuza review a game that's supposed to be about yakuza. With the exception of how the protagonist gets in fights all the time and isn’t really properly dressed for his yakuza rank, they gave it good marks.
And The Slacktivist takes a swing at Tony Perkins, professional liar, in a quandary of whether being a liar or a deliberate liar is worse for said liar and his victims, which brings to mind the quote about Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics, all three of which things the professional liar is well-acquainted with. And thus, he probably knows the "traditional" marriage that all the professional liars want their victims to defend is really a product of about the 1970s - marriage through history has been far more colorful and has evolved greately from the beginnings. After all, it used to be about contracts, politics, and joining families and fortunes - love had very little to do with it. So, yeah.
Finally, to complete the amusement, the Slacktivist points out of many possible infrasturucture improvements that would help solve a lot of problems together - the federal government commits to buy offshore wind electricity, which should in turn spur the private sector to build those offshore wind energy plants, resulting in jobs for the unemployed and in reducing one’s dependence on fossil-fuel burns. It’s a solution even a die-hard private-sector over all conservative should be able to work with - private investment, private jobs, and government buying from the private sector at market rates. What’s not to like? It’s not a complete solution, but it also might help spur the thought that America is capable of Big Things and get us moving on doing other Big Things to solve Big Problems. It’s certainly better than emulating Chile in privatizing Social Security, as Sharron Angle claims we should be doing.
To cleanse the palate from that awful taste, a short segment of Annie Oakley firing weapons, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of her birth.
Speaking of birthdays, a very merry (belated) one to
greyweirdo, without whom I probably would have never seen and enjoyed Seven Samurai.And finally in our headlining section, warning labels for journalism stories, useful for when someone should know important information about the article, or “article”, they are reading. There should proabbly be a lot of those plastered all around my blog posts, shouldn’t there? Well, maybe if someone archive-dives, they’ll go to the trouble of it, and if they do, could they lay down some tags, please, too? *sweatdrop*
Out in the world today, expect the fear grade to ramp up significantly as the first shipment of nuclear fuel for Iran's Bushehr plant will be loaded in and the plant fired up. This also means that people can start making concrete data on whether or not Iran intends to use the stuff for nuclear weapons development. One way or another, I suspect we’re going to find out what exactly countries are going to do.
The groundwork for breaking the August 2011 deadline for troop drawdown in Afghanistan begins from General Petraeus, building in the loophole of “as conditions on the ground permit” so as to prevent anyone from actually having to make good on a promise. Elsewhere, private security contractors, i.e. mercenaries, are on notice to get out of Afghanistan in four months, when they will be banned.
Wikileaks intend to publish the rest of the Pentagon documents it has received, after combing through them to remove things like names that would hurt people if published in the clear. According to the Pentagon, those released documents would cause even more damage that the ones already put out have. We repeat the point made before - if you don’t want to be burnt by the publication of your documents, you might want to stop or reduce the amount of things you do that would set up that situation.
Domestically, we peer in on Detroit, a place that suffers greatly from bad infrastructure, lack of business, and a host of other problems, while it revitalizes itself and works out problems on a very local level, including things like community gardens, resolution parks, and a DIY attitude to get neighbors to build their neighborhoods again, instead of being too afraid of each other to band together.
Mr. Taibbi is back, reminding us why we like long-form journalism and showing that the financial reform bill, much like all the big-ticket legislative accomplishments of the Obama administration, is only a fraction of what it could have been, thanks to the interference of the opposition party, the party in power, lobbyists, and businesses with a giant stake in making sure it didn't actually change all that much, including the underlying structure of the “check-bouncing scheme” that was the subprime mortgage-to-AAA-investments-leveraged-50-times-over scheme perpetrated by banks. The populist anger that was there and wanted actual bad things to happen to those who had run the economy into the iceberg was carefully ignored and maneuvered around by the politicians so that the White Star Line could tout its new line of government-approved and regulated impregnable ships that will go sailing into ice-infested waters at full speed.
The Marine Corps may be returning to its expeditionary forces origins, as part of a services review that is supposed to create some savings on Pentagon spending over the next five years.
And in places where real people are, an article looking into doing lots of possession reduction to find more happiness, so that one is not stuck in the work-consumption treadmill (one we’d love to get off of, if the blasted debts didn’t keep at us...), culminating in basically trying to pack one's life on a portable hard drive.
At 75 years of age, everybody wants to be the one to fix Social Security, usually by transforming it into a shadow of its former self, or allowing the private sector and its fluctuations to tie themselves into the trust fund's money. And, as those of us who follow politics have found out, Social Security privatization is one of the more...sane issues the politics is about this election cycle.
In technology, having been pioneers of wi-fi availability to draw in customers, some coffeehouses are now pulling the plug on their connectivity, catering to the audience that wants coffee instead of Internet, those audiences that feel wireless Internet is too much of a distraction, or trying to dislodge the permanent customer taking up residence for the entire day to use the Internet without purchasing much. We plug public libraries, most of which offer a free wireless Internet signal, but you’ll have to contend with library crowds and space - if you need pristine, no-distractions life, the public library may or may not be for you.
Jupiter might have killed a kid brother planet early on in the formation of the Sol system, grabbing a massive rocky planet, swallowing it whole, and burning up most of the rocky elements into its atmosphere, according to a hypothesis generated on why Jupiter’s core is smaller than most gas giants and why it has a much heaver concentration of heavy elements in its atmosphere.
If you've been suckered into choosing a bad option because it looks better than a worse option, then you're not alone - even single-celled molds will choose the median option when presented with extremes.
An estimation of how many books there are in the world, based on sifting through records and removing all the duplicates, not-books, and other things, including T-shirts and a turkey probe.
Welcome to opinions, where a crystal ball sees military and despotic governments coming to power when the climate change phenomenon finally disrupts people enough that they get mad and start fighting back opposed to forces insistent that oil exploration and drilling continue immediately, despite the current lack of effective safety mechanisms for that process.
There’s also very well-thought out reasons why someone would want to not have kids, none of which have anything to do with mental illness, pathology, or somehow subverting the “inevitable” desires of the biological clock.
And then there’s the people confident that the Democratic Party are sunk in this election because their "Blame Bush" strategy isn't working. I don’t know about that - I think the Democrats have moved on to “Look at what sort of insane people the Republican party has put up for candidates - do you really want those people running the roost?” and that Mr. Rove is trying to turn it back into a “Blame Bush” strategy. Ms. strassel follows that lead and highlights three Democrats who voted mostly against the major points in the president's agenda who are doing better than the despicable Democrats are supposed to be doing. They’re not necessarily winning, but they’re polling better because they’re in conservative districts and they voted conservative instead of liberal. Transplant them to, say, the progressive center of the country and they’re going out on their ears. Trying to say that going along with the Obama agenda is a sink or swim issue is simpleminded at best. Mr. Zuckerman is more worried that our current state is the new normal, which is extremely bad for us all.
Perhaps taking the cake for “Missed the point, there, by a wide margin” - Mr. Douthat says "Yes, it's wonderful that we have a constitution that espouses freedom of religion, but really, those Muslims have to adapt to American demands and assimilate if they ever want to have a hope of being something other than The Bloodthirsty Religion", including not building their house of worship so close to where someone committed a terrorist attack. The way things work is not, “Well, assimilate into us and then we’ll accept you.” but “Here, let us try to bridge our culture and yours, so that you will want to enhance us with your diversity, assimilate in nicely, and still feel like you can retain enough of your identity to feel comfortable.” The bridging process includes making sure that omeone has the right to worship without interference or discrimination from xenophobes. Although I suppose that if the opposition is claiming the proposed msoque really is part of the attack site because a fragment of the plane struck and damaged the building, and the opposition has to resort to sneering at the prominence of the people supporting the Constitution, instead of offering arguments as to why they think the First Amendment is wrong and should be set aside in favor of “cultural sensitivity” - wait a minute, I’ve heard this argument before, except usually they’re the ones thundering along about the inviolate Constitution. Once they can muster a real argument, I'll be happy to listen to them. Whether they’re a joker on the street or the Senate Majority Leader trying to seem closer to Sharron Angle, instead of running very firmly away from her positions.
Finally, in opinions, the accusation of the empty suit, except this time as a comic book character, along with the accusation that the President's a super-leftist socialist, a Muslim appeaser, an apology maker where he should be wagging his finger and telling other nations they can't get close to our awesome, and that we should expect him to jump the shark sometime soon, because his ratings are in the toilet and the script-writers will want something to get people watching again. It’s a greatest misses album full of cover songs.
Last for tonight, going straight to the source: Having members of the Japanese Yakuza review a game that's supposed to be about yakuza. With the exception of how the protagonist gets in fights all the time and isn’t really properly dressed for his yakuza rank, they gave it good marks.
